Engineers continually endeavor to improve the performance and efficiency of platforms and computing systems while minimizing the associated manufacturing and operating costs. For example, unnecessary or superfluous hardware components may be removed and power consumption may be formally managed (e.g., through hardware, firmware, and/or software). Additionally, distributed computing (e.g., cloud computing) and computation aggregation mechanisms have sought to improve performance and efficiency. Rack scale architecture (RSA) permits many servers or other computing devices to be connected to a switch (e.g., a management device) and shared resources to be distributed. For example, shared resources may be shared among nodes (i.e., devices connected to the switch) with a bulk of the capabilities being embedded in or otherwise handled by the switch.
A switch may manage the booting of several servers in its “rack.” In doing so, the switch may instruct the servers when to boot, perform updates, idle, turn off, and/or perform other functionality. Additionally, a switch or other remote device may boot an operating system of one of the servers remotely, which is feasible due to the hardware-agnostic nature of operating systems. However, Basic Input/Output System (BIOS) and other pre-boot firmware must be fully aware of the server hardware in order to initialize that hardware. As such, BIOS and pre-boot firmware are stored on locally attached flash memory of the server, which include boot instructions customized to the particular node (e.g., based on the central processing unit, chipset, component manufacturer, and/or date of component production).